


Some Thoughts on Randomness

by skysonglark



Category: Blaseball (Video Game)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-31
Updated: 2020-08-31
Packaged: 2021-03-07 01:47:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 793
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26218867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/skysonglark/pseuds/skysonglark
Kudos: 6





	Some Thoughts on Randomness

I keep the radio on while I’m working, listening to the robotic voice calling her latest game. There’s always a game. Sometimes my friends ask me how I can stand it. But plenty of people build relationships despite one person’s absence. She gets time off every once in a while.

I sort of thought that was the only thing, the only real wild card in an otherwise pretty consistent existence. A certain level of weird is expected, acceptable. But then the incinerations started.

She wasn’t allergic to peanuts, so I could deal with sudden storms. But rogue umpires turning people to ash with a look? We didn’t sign up for that.

I asked her at breakfast, a well-timed moment of off-time where she could make me coffee and fill the apartment with a fleeting domesticity. She sighed, and turned around, leaning back against the counter.

It was a four point argument. Point one: you don’t quit. You can’t.  
“I know some people who could make us disappear,” I said.  
Point two: She had a responsibility to the team, to the fans. They might not make the playoffs without her.  
“That works both ways, you know.”  
Point three: It was a tiny chance. I took the same risks going out covering active situations, right?

“Definitely mathematically lower, probability wise. You know what the risk is.”  
Point four: “This is my life, Val. I can’t just change my whole life because something might happen.”  
“So it’s worth dying for? Blaseball is worth dying for?”  
She shrugged. “I’m never going to make you understand, Val.”

I didn’t. I went to wakes and watched ashes scatter to the winds and, Gods, I really didn’t.

But you can get used to anything, if it lasts long enough. I resigned myself to the fact that if I wanted to be with her, I’d have to live with the risk. So I did.

The Microphone itself wasn’t even that big of a deal. A new assignment for me, a three point talk about why the Los Angeli didn’t seem inherently dangerous, but I thought that would be the only change. In a strange way, the Microphone was the best thing that had ever happened to me. I even joked it would kind of work out if she suddenly got traded to the Tacos.

Gods do I wish I could take that one back.

“This makes point two totally invalid!” We’d had the argument enough times we both remembered what ‘point two’ meant.  
“You said just last week it would be convenient if I got traded.”  
“This isn’t trading, this is — I don’t even know what this is!” I was pacing back and forth on the sidewalk in front of Blisney Variant 48. “The teams didn’t even want it. Nobody wanted it.”  
I could hear her shrugging even over the phone. “Why would this change anything, Val? Eclipses are actually rare right now, it’s mathematically less dangerous for me. So I change teams. So what? I’m still playing.”  
“And then what? What about next season? And the one after that? You have to draw a line somewhere.”  
Her voice went quiet, like I’m a toddler and she’s trying to explain that stoves are hot. “You could disappear into a rift tomorrow.”  
“Yeah, that’s living. Anything can happen.” Then I heard myself and I shut up. Listened to her breathing on the other end of the line, a few thousand miles away. Tried to figure out what the difference is. I took a deep breath. “I don’t understand how you can care about something that doesn’t care about you.”  
“The rifts don’t care about you.”  
“Yeah, because they’re rifts. The Commissioner’s a person.”  
A silence, before she said the thing she has to say. She always says the things she has to say. Then she sighed. “We don’t know what’s going to happen, Val. I just want to do the thing I like doing for as long as I can. Same as you.”  
I looked up at the broken, technicolour sky. Back at Kirby, trying to reorganize the safety gear and camera equipment before we went inside. I had points, too. A three point argument for why she should stay despite my insistence on throwing myself into rifts in spacetime.  
“I’m never going to make you understand,” I’d told her.  
“I still think we should overthrow the whole system,” I said.  
She laughed. “Maybe tomorrow.”  
We stayed there, silent, savouring the moment. Us against the world. Something to hold onto.  
“Hey, you know something I do know for sure?”  
“What’s that.”  
“I’m never going to regret caring about you.”  
I heard her catch her breath. Heard her smiling. Over my head a purple star blinked in and out of existence.  
“Me neither.”


End file.
